How Can I Automate the Backup of a Quickbooks Server?

I have three computers: The first is the company file server which has the Quick Books company file, is always on, and lives in the closet. The other two are Quick Books Clients. All are XP Pro.

I need a way to automatically backup the QB data file, without any user intervention.

Quick Books has a built in scheduled backup utility, but from what I've read, it only works when the software is running in single user mode. (and obviously putting the server into single user mode defeats the concept of having a server). Also, I'm not actually running QB itself on the server, just the "QB Database Server" process that sits in the system tray.

Surely there must be a way to automate this? I'm open to any ideas/suggestions.

Thanks!

I believe if there are no clients accessing any of the company files, then you're good to go. You can just copy the quickbooks data files out of the directory, without the accompanying .nd lock files and they should be clean.

The Quickbooks "server" is nothing more than a glorified lock manager. It's basically just the locking code from the multi-user part of the client that runs on a dedicated machine and ensures the files are always open in multi-user mode. As far as I can glean, Quickbooks just determines this by checking for the presence of the '.nd' files.

Basically we just pick some times where we are reasonably sure nobody will be accessing the .QBW files and make copies of them to a backup location. We actually do this once an hour, and so far we've had no problems with recovering files when the users screw them up.

Why isn't the automatic backup feature (creation of qbb files) that's already in QuickBooks suitable enough for your purposes? You can set it to backup every time the program is closed. In QB 2009, the ability to create a backup in multi-user mode was added, and also the ability to send messages through chat to other logged in users, or to kick them out of QuickBooks. :-) Might be worth the upgrade.

Newer versions (7 and up) of QuickBooks Enterprise can run on Linux. Or see Intuit's note on running QB 2007 on a Linux server at enterprisesuite.intuit.com (click on the "technical" tab in the middle of the page under the video)

There is also now a SaaS add-on called SmartVault - one of their features is an automatic backup of the QuickBooks file to their online storage every time someone exits QuickBooks. It works with QB 2007. see smartvault.com/backup/index

Also, copying the QBW file will not give you a full copy of everything that is used in QuickBooks. Best example is if they have imported a logo to be used on invoices or other forms, it will not be grabbed with the QBW file. See http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/knowledgebasearticle/1008679

Maybe I have a better solution for making the backups automatically on a multi-user installation. Since the version 10 the schedule backups features works in the background, so theres no need of switching to single user or wait for the application to close.

What I did was the following:

1. Create a share folder on the server which everyone has permission to write.
2. Create a schedule backup rule on the client application of the user and point it to the share folder. The time of the backup is one hour before the company close.
3. Create the same backup rule on every client (exact dates, time and path), so it doesn't depends on a specific machine to be on.

I had to do this per client and company.

The only inconvenience that I found whit this solutions is that QB does not handle well the amount of copies to be store. It create new file every time and no remove the olds. This is what I'm trying to handle because we are going to install and online backup service.